Fall 2020 PCA Magazine

54 PCA The Magazine | AUTUMN 2020 PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG S Customer Conversion | BY JARR I D TRUDEAU, Vice President of Sales, Kristoff Cigars The Industry STORE BRANDING is one of the most important steps any business, regardless of industry, can take toward creating meaningful growth and mitigating attrition and lost sales. It touches on merchandising, marketing, employee retention, sales, margin and store culture. There have been many articles as to how to build meaningful branding within a store, but building a brand and not leveraging it is like putting on a tuxedo to go to bed. It’s expensive, uncomfortable and, ultimately, a giant waste of time. How then do we use store branding to our advantage every day? When I was coming up in the corporate world, one of my mentors told me that the goal of a business isn’t to find or create a customer, it is to keep a customer. What most operators don’t realize is that they’ve already worked extremely diligently on building their store’s brand just by operating it. You keep the lights on, deliver great customer service and offer great products. This all lands squarely in the brand-building column. What it doesn’t do, however, is ask or incentivize the customer to do what you want. Small changes and additions to your branding messaging create real P&L results at the end of the year. Here’s an example. When I worked as an executive for Target, we had noticed that Redcard (Target’s store credit card and debit card) holders spent, on average, 30 percent more than the average guest but were a minuscule portion of the Target shoppers we saw on a daily basis. We realized these people —Real branding can yield real results, but you need to focus the target of your efforts.